Roelof Botha Biography

Roelof Botha is a venture capitalist and company director. By training, he is a qualified actuary.

Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital and currently sits on the boards of Jawbone, Eventbrite, Evernote, Bird, Ethos, Mahalo, Natera, Nimbula, Square, Tokbox, Tumblr, Weebly, Unity, Whisper and Xoom. He also works with 10gen, AssureRX, FutureAdvisor, Instagram, Mixpanel and MuSigma. He previously sat on the board of directors of Meebo and YouTube before they were each acquired by Google.

On Forbes' Midas List, an annual ranking of venture capital professionals, he ranked 22nd in 2008 and 26th in 2009. He is a regular member of the Midas List and has continued to move up the ranks to #14 in 2018.

Botha was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and at the age of six he moved to Cape Town with his parents. He was raised in Hout Bay, a suburb of Cape Town, and attended Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck. Botha earned a BSc in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1996 with the highest GPA in the history of the program. Botha worked as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co., Johannesburg, from August 1996 through June 1998. He then moved to the United States, where he attended the Stanford University Graduate School of Business from 1998 through 2000 and received an MBA, where he was the Henry Ford II Scholar as Stanford GSB valedictorian.

In 2000, prior to his graduation from Stanford, Botha became director of corporate development for PayPal. He moved on to vice-president of finance and was named CFO in September 2001. Botha was 28 when PayPal went public in February 2002. The company was purchased by eBay in October 2002. Botha left to join Sequoia Capital in January 2003.

At Sequoia, Botha oversaw the firm's investment in YouTube, Instagram, and Square, among others. He also helped to plan the acquisition of Xoom by PayPal. In 2017, Botha took over lead responsibility for Sequoia's US operations from Jim Goetz.

Botha's father, also named Roelof, is an economist. His grandfather was Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha, a South African politician who served as the country's foreign minister in the last years of the apartheid era. His uncle was the rock musician Piet Botha..

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